Money and Happiness

I read this about a week ago and it’s bugged me ever since. I mean – what an idiot. What specifically bothers me about it? It baffles me that human beings can lack the BASIC INTELLIGENCE to figure out *how to use* the money as a *resource* for happiness – instead of expecting the money itself to fill the void. Money will not make you happy. *SHOCK*. However, what this idiot and so very many others has utterly failed to do – is to use the money as a resource to gain more happiness. It’s a resource that opens doors, that’s all. You can help charities, or set up your own – that tends to grant many people a great sense of happiness. You can travel and see a world you have otherwise only heard fables about. You can educate yourself first-hand about the world, cultures, history, whatever fancies you really – money opens that door. You USE it, not horde it and expect to somehow be happier. It’s all in how you put it to work toward that goal.

Balance that thought against the great UNHAPPINESS caused in the everyday by the basic inability to pay a rent, fix or repair a broken vehicle (thus your very basic freedom to get around nixed), get the basic healthcare you require to go on living, no permanent home you could ever buy, standing at the grocery cashier never *sure* that the money you need to give for food will ever reliably be there. Can’t go home to see your family. All the basic horrors I face every day. I haven’t seen my own mother in 9 years. Or my sisters. All far away and I never have the money, or the reliable transportation. So people bitching about money failing to make them happy tends to irritate those of us in great need – because it honestly shouldn’t be THAT hard to figure out how to use it to enhance your happiness, not expect it to grant it outright.

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Karl Rabeder grew up poor and thought that life would be wonderful if he had money. But when he got rich, Karl discovered that he was unhappy … so he decided to give away every penny of his £3 million fortune:

“My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come.”

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.

His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.

“For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness,” he said. “I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years,” said Mr Rabeder.

But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling.

“More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’,” he said. “I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need. I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing.”